We live in a weird world.

We have three and four figure paychecks.

Five and six figure annual incomes.

Tax rates that no one really understands.

We want to look out for others while also looking out for ourselves.

When our government talks about Billions and Trillions, it is beyond our comprehension.

Here’s what a million looks like:

1,000,000

A billion is a thousand millions.

1,000.000,000

A trillion is a thousand billions.

1,000,000,000,000

We hear these kinds of numbers associated with jobs, money, spending, government, etc.

But what about giving?

Next week when we have our official election day there will be over 100 million people voting including those that cast early votes.

People vote for the person or party that they feel will represent them on the issues they feel are important.

It could be:

Taxes

Wars

Pro-life vs Pro-Choice

The role of Federal vs State governments

Debt

Spending

Healthcare

or any number of other issues that people feel passionate about.

What strikes me as outrageous however is the billions of dollars spent by the candidates and their supporters to persuade us to vote for them and not for their opponent.

I was reading an estimate that 5.8 billion will be spent for Federal offices.  That includes Senate, House and Presidential campaigns.

Let’s see what that looks like:

$5,800,000,000.00

That covers 435 races for the House and about 35 Senate seats plus the Pres & V-P race.  Let’s round up to 500 contests and double it to 1000 with the assumption that each race has 2 candidates.

We are averaging almost $6 million dollars per candidate spending to get a job whose salary is $174,000 for Congressmen and Senators, $230,000 for Vice-President and $400,000 for President.  And yes they get more for certain expenses but even if you do the math and multiply times the years in office, (2 for Congressmen, 4 for Pres & V-P, 6 for Senators) the dollars spent on getting elected do not come back in salary & benefits.

Not directly at least.

I could go on with this bit of a ramble but I’ll stop for now and let you use this for food for thought for conversations held publicly, privately, face to face or online.